Tonight at a small group meeting of friends, we tried "praying in color." This is a prayer practice based on Sybil Macbeth's book of the same name. But you don't really need the book. All you need is a piece of paper and a pen or markers. She recommends keeping the doodling to abstract shapes, names, lines, squiggles and dots, but basically the point of the whole thing is to think of doodling as prayer; the drawing/coloring helps us to focus on our concerns, and then the right brain makes creative associations and connections. I love this practice, and I think it can help me listen, which is something I'm trying to do more of every day. I have been particularly thinking about people I know for whom the holidays are a sad or difficult time.
Also, you can learn a lot about a person from their doodlings. I flipped through a book of Presidential doodlings once, and they were fascinating: Nixon's were perverse, Clinton's boring; or was it the other way around? At this point, I can't remember, but I'm having fun typing the word "doodling." And now it sounds really weird.
On that note, here are some lingering questions from my week (please comment, by all means):
1. Why don't people wear ear muffs anymore?
2. Why is it so hard to know when to STOP decorating? (I'm particularly thinking of holiday lights and lawn ornaments, cakes, and hair dye).
3. When you call someone's cell phone, why does it take five minutes of listening to detailed instructions just to be able to leave a message? Don't we already know that "beep" means "start talking"? ("At the beep, please record your message. When you are finished with your message, you may either hang up, or push pound for more options.")
4. What is it about remembering our dreams that is so exciting and yet so disconcerting?
5. What is it about a person carving a gigantic roast beef at the end of every buffet that makes me lose my appetite?
p.s. Many thanks to Drs. Jaime Goff and Jackie Halstead for the "Praying in Color" idea.
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4 comments:
Hey, you decided to use my idea (well, actually Jackie's idea) of prayer as art! I'm glad it went well. We're talking about spiritual disciplines in our small group, so if I'm in charge of leading the discussion on prayer, I might give it a try as well. I loved your question, "Why do people not know when to stop decorating?" I know that my mom doesn't know when to stop. She was complaining the other day about "having" to put up the Christmas decorations because she dreaded "having" to take them down. I said, "Mom, you know you don't have to put all that stuff up, don't you?" But I guarantee that when we arrive for the holidays, it will be decorated in true Griswold-family fashion.
I think the ear muff craze started dwindling around the time Star Wars came out. People saw Princess Leia and said, "Is that what I look like in these?"
And as stupid and pointless as the detailed voicemail instructions may be, most people need them. Even though they think they don't. That's why you sometimes see people hang up and say things like, "Well, I think I left him a message" or "Hey, I left you a message the other day, but I don't know if I did it right. I just hung up when I was done." What else do you think you need to do??
I loved the doodling prayer practice. It made me think about praying (and doodling) in a new way.
About decorating, we have some neighbors that went all out for Halloween starting in September. (By "all out" I mean they even had a skeleton hanging from a noose in their tree.) When they put up Christmas decorations a few weeks ago, we thought they actually looked really good. Since then, however, they have continued to add more and more lights. Festive, yes. But where does it end?
Now I want Jaime to have the discussion on prayer so we can doodle too... And you're right. Doodle is a fun word.
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